Fighting Progress Stagnation With Y-Productive

Kyrylo is Y-Productive's co-founder and Head of Marketing. When not speaking with YP users or writing content for our website, he loves reading a good book or playing PlayStation with his GF.

Published on

December 18, 2017

December 18, 2017

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The world has changed significantly over the last decades and the amount of distracting digital garbage and informational noise has increased drastically. This only makes productivity crisis deeper as people are suppressed by progress stagnation, lack of time control or procrastination. Not a big surprise that a modern person nowadays requires assistance from special apps to make it through to the goal. Y-Productive makes it better by helping you deal with various problems your own mind puts on your way.

How to spot a problem using Y-Productive

Check if you have any signs of efficiency issues as mentioned below:

Multitasking.

Multitasking is generally bad for work productivity. The reason of that is a competitive nature of priorities, operated by prefrontal cortex of our brain. Robert Desimone, the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, states that in order to maintain focus our mind creates a visual imagery of the objective. It is difficult to keep more than one visual objective at our temporary memory at the same time. Such attempt decreases your focus and splits your attention between activities of different kinds. In result, the progress will be divided between tasks instead of completing them.

Constantly switching between several tabs or apps.

Switching indicates the number of times you have been shifting your attention to an unproductive app. It may be a sign of multitasking, but may also be caused by procrastination and leads to losing focus and tempo by the same principle of brain work as multitasking.

This case indicates backtracking to emails and Facebook too much, which clearly affected the productivity on the major task

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Spending too much time on the wrong priorities.

One way or another, tasks have different importance in our work-life. Constantly working on easy tasks instead of a major but difficult one may cause progress stagnation. The reason of that is simple: upon solving tasks the prefrontal cortex uses glucose and oxygen as a fuel. So you risk to spend most of the energy on the low-priority tasks and face the big one exhausted. If you spotted a significant productivity decrease, signaled by bars` height drop, try drinking something that contains glucose, as Dr. Ray Baumeister suggests. The lemonade and a 10 min rest before taking on a difficult task will do.

Another example of wrong prioritizing followed with a productivity drop. My friend should’ve worked on fixing a critical bug but was too distracted by composing a weekly report and mailing afterward. A small mistake that cost a whole work day

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How to tackle a problem with Y-Productive:

Understand what’s wrong. Track time and analyze the chart to clear up the situation. The height of the chart bars is an easy and intuitive way to know if you are sticking to the plan. By watching your behavior tabulated in plain sight, you may notice a certain tendency of which you were unaware before.

Pay attention to the tasks you set up and the actions you take while working.This way you’ll spot wrong goals which head you in a false direction or unnecessary actions which split your time and diffuse your focus.

Take advantage of the Focus mode option. You may turn it on for particular tasks you need. In such way, you’ll avoid distractions and establish a useful habit of concentration on achieving important goals.

Acknowledge the problem. Act on it, using Y-Productive to have your tempo under control. Keep an eye on the chart, paying attention to the quality (the height and the color) and the quantity (the time duration) of the bars and you’ll notice any changes if you veer off course before it becomes a problem again.

As an example, here is a great productive workday Alex accomplished recently by learning his weak and strong spots with Y-Productive:

We wish you the most productive day as well! :)

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Thank you for reading the article. If you have any questions or want to share your feedback - you can always reach us in chat at the right bottom corner of your browser. See ya! :)